Knowledge that Transforms

This article analyzes the relationship between consumer bankruptcy patterns and the destruction of soft information caused by mergers. Using a major Canadian bank merger as a source of exogenous variation in local banking conditions, we show that local markets affected by the merger exhibit an increase in consumer bankruptcy rates post-merger. The evidence is consistent with the most plausible mechanism being the disruption of consumer–bank relationships. Markets affected by the merger show a decrease in the merging institutions’ branch presence and market share, including those stemming from higher switching rates. We rule out alternative mechanisms such as changes in quantity of credit, loan rates, or observable borrower characteristics.

Only 16% (23%) of all empirical studies published in the top four (fourteen) Finance journals examine non-US markets, a fraction that is well below measures reflecting their economic importance. This “home bias” measure fluctuates across years with a weakly declining trend. There is also a “foreign bias” in which some non-US countries are more frequently the subject of published papers than others. I am able to explain only a small fraction of either the home-bias or the foreign-bias puzzles. Surprisingly, there are on average 2.01 higher annual cumulative citations per non-US paper published relative to cohort-matched US-focused papers.

We show that the propensity of a bank to experience extreme co-movements in its credit default swap (CDS) premia together with the market is priced in the bank’s default swap spread during the financial crisis. We measure a bank’s CDS tail beta by estimating the upper tail dependence between its default swap spreads and a CDS market index. Our study shows that protection sellers receive a premium for bearing the risk of extreme upward co-movements in default risk. The economic significance of this effect is large yet limited to the recent financial crisis. Banks in the upper quintile of CDS tail beta have spreads that are on average 140 basis points higher than those of banks in the lower CDS tail beta quintile.

Complete limit order data from Korea show individual stocks’ demand and supply elasticities correlating negatively in short windows. That is, whenever a stock’s demand is unusually elastic, its supply is unusually inelastic, and vice versa. However, in long windows, individual stocks’ demand and supply elasticities correlate positively. Notably, both fall about 40% with the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, and remain depressed long after the market and macroeconomic variables recover. A parsimonious model explains both findings with investor information heterogeneity and risk-aversion parameters, fixed in the short-run, being permanently shifted by the crisis.

We present the Shapley Value as a methodology for risk attribution and use it to derive measures of banks’ systemic importance. The methodology possesses attractive properties, such as fairness and efficiency. It also leads naturally to a framework for the analysis of different drivers of systemic importance: bank size, bank-specific risk, and the commonality of banks’ exposures. We prove that, all else equal, an increase in bank size leads to a more than proportional increase in systemic importance. We also show how alternative applications of the Shapley Value methodology can be used in designing policy tools with system-wide objectives.

Are courts effective monitors of corporate decisions? In a controversial landmark case, the Delaware Supreme Court held directors personally liable for breaching their fiduciary duties, signaling a sharp increase in Delaware’s scrutiny over corporate decisions. In our event study, low-growth Delaware firms outperformed matched non-Delaware firms by 1% in the three day event window. In contrast, high-growth Delaware firms under-performed by 1%. Contrary to previous literature, we conclude that court decisions can have large, significant and heterogeneous effects on firm value, and that rules insulating directors from court scrutiny benefit the fastest growing sectors of the economy.

We propose to impose a weighted l1 and squared l2 norm penalty on the portfolio weights to improve out-of-sample (OOS) performances of portfolio optimization when the number of assets becomes large. We show that under certain conditions, the realized risk of the optimal minimum variance portfolio (MVP) obtained from the strategy can asymptotically be lower than those of benchmark portfolios with a high probability. Our theoretical results imply that penalty parameters for the weighted-norm penalty can be specified as a simple function of the number of assets and sample size. With the theoretical results, we also develop an automatic calibration procedure for choosing the penalty parameters. We demonstrate superior OOS performances of the weighted-norm MVP with two real data sets. Finally, we propose several alternative norm penalties and show that their OOS performances are comparable to the weighted-norm strategy.

We find that put options trading volume and bid-ask spreads both increase with equity lending fees. However, we also find that put options trading volume decreases with lending fees for banned stocks during the 2008 Short-Sale Ban period, when only options market makers could short. By separating the speculative demand of short sellers from the hedging demand of options market makers in the lending market, our results provide a thorough analysis of the interaction between the options market and the equity lending market. We also shed light on the substitutability/complementarity between put options volume and short interest shown in the literature.

We analyze the impact of a requirement similar to the Basel III Liquidity Coverage Ratio on the bank intermediation applying Regression Discontinuity Designs. Using a unique dataset on Dutch banks, we show that a liquidity requirement causes long-term borrowing and lending rates as well as demand for long-term interbank loans to increase. Lower levels of aggregate liquidity increase the estimated effects. Short-term borrowing and lending rates only rise during periods of lower market-wide liquidity. Further, banks do not seem able to pass on the increased funding costs in the interbank market to their private sector clients. Rather, a liquidity requirement seems to decrease banks’ interest margins.

Efficient investment of personal savings depends on clear risk disclosures. We study the propensity of individuals to violate some implications of expected utility under alternative “mass-market” descriptions of investment risk, using a discrete choice experiment. We found violations in around 25% of choices, and substantial variation in rates of violation, depending on the mode of risk disclosure and participants’ characteristics. When risk is described as the frequency of returns below or above a threshold we observe more violations than for range and probability-based descriptions. Innumerate individuals are more likely to violate expected utility than those with high numeracy. Apart from the very elderly, older individuals are less likely to violate the restrictions. The results highlight the challenges of disclosure regulation.